Review of The Amityville Haunting (2011) by Kyle E — 20 Feb 2012

Honestly, before I rip this movie to shreds, as it needs to be, let's examine one thing: with the latest craze of "found-footage films" rolling in, why hasn't this been done on a higher budget? This is a great idea, poorly executed simply because it doesn't have a budget.

Now that we've gotten the one, positive thing out of the way, "The Amityville Haunting" is a horrible, terrible execution, playing off of one of my favorite horror stories/movies of all time. The original Amityville Horror is still a masterpiece in my opinion, and every film since then has been bogged down into garbage (although I felt some details were fleshed out in the second film). Since then we've had every iteration from a Dollhouse being haunted to, now, you guessed it, found footage.

First things first, I've seen the actual Amityville house, and this isn't it. If we are going to go on the notion of this being a legit film, then at least make the house look realistic, or at least portray it as it looks. With that being said, this found footage film is only effective in its final moments, but to get to those final, chilling (they were kind chilling, surprisingly) moments, you have to work through literally 80 minutes of terrible acting. In fact, the scenes in which the father here goes insane are some of the worst I've seen in anything recently. It is down right laughable. Most of the kills are a gigantic joke too, especially when the dude installing security cameras gets electrocuted. I also love how they tried to turn this into a total "Paranormal Activity" rip off with installing cameras all of the house towards the end, it made it feel like the filmmakers at work here got lazy. I also hated that the child using the camera and filming everything in this movie had to re-cap the day's events every single day. Plus I won't lie, this family only lasted 5 days in this house, every other family lasted a month. Pussies.

At the end of it, I just really wish that a studio would have put a little more merit behind making this an actual theater run movie, with somewhat of a budget. With those things, it could have easily given the Paranormal Activity franchise a run for its money. Sadly though, "The Amityville Haunting" is destined to be another wasted dvd to line the $4 bargain bin dvd sections of Walmart for years to come.